Game of Thrones season seven gets off to a record breaking start

The first episode of the seventh season has continued its unprecedented run

The first episode of the seventh season of Sky Atlantic’s Game of Thrones has continued its unprecedented run by recording the biggest consolidated audience for a programme ever on Sky with 4.7 million.

Dragonstone almost doubled its audience in the week after it launched, adding an additional 1.85m to the original 2.8 million who watched it last Monday (17 July). This stand out performance also meant the episode secured the fifth biggest programme audience of the year in Sky homes, outperforming Sherlock, Call the Midwife and Line of Duty.

The 4.7m figure is made up of those who watched the 2am simulcast (live or on demand) or the 9pm transmission last Monday, those who have chosen to catch up over the past seven days through on demand on Sky Atlantic or online streaming service NOW TV, and customers who recorded the episode and watched it back.

A further 729,000 downloads and streams of the episode were made via the Sky Go app, with this expected to increase further over the coming weeks. Sky Atlantic has seen a huge increase in Game of Thrones audiences year on year with a 31% increase on the opening episode of season six last year (3.56m consolidated).

Gary Davey, managing director content, Sky commented: “The Game of Thrones phenomenon is incredible. It just gets bigger and better every year which is reflected in the huge number of people tuning in. Once again viewers have taken advantage of being able to enjoy the show in the way that suits them, whether that’s staying up till 2am to watch it live or catching up in their own time. For me, it has to be first thing in the morning before work – I’m too impatient to wait to the end of the day to find out what’s happened.”

Excitement and enthusiasm for the series continues with 2,153,000 viewers tuning in for the second episode on Monday. Customers have also have also taken advantage of the whole back catalogue being made available to catch up on since the beginning of May with over 16 million downloads made via boxsets, a further 11.3m via NOW TV and 5.5m downloads and streams via the Sky Go app.

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